Human-caused climate change is altering the temperatures and rainfall patterns to which those and other trees are accustomed, and many have already been pushed close to the edge of what they can endure.
Industry and urban growth have pushed many of them to the edges of their habitats, and climate change has only exacerbated the problem.
The model also enables the scientists to estimate how mismatched a plant is from its native climate.
“Plant species can directly reveal to us their climate preference and their vulnerability to potential climate change in the ‘language’ of their leaves and wood,” said Sack, the paper’s senior author.
“We are tuning in to what the plants are telling us about their preferences, in the language of their tissues and physiology, aiming to help them survive escalating climate challenges.”
“The reflection of species’ preferred climate in their wood and leaves evidently arose from millennia of evolution that matched plant physiology to climate across California,” Medeiros said.
“We also found that many plants in the ecosystems we sampled were occupying locations that differed in climate from what we estimated to be their optimal niche. As climate change ensues, we think this will tend to aggravate the sensitivity of many species, including common trees like the California buckeye and shrubs like the purple sage and California lilacs.”
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Identifying suitable new habitats will soon become a matter of life or death for some California native species, according to Lawren Sack, a UCLA professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.
In a new study, a team led by Sack and other UCLA biologists deciphered a secret language in leaves and woody stems that points to the species’ optimal habitats.
The new research, published in Functional Ecology, describes a statistical model that estimates each species’ preferred temperature and amount of rainfall based on its height; the size, wilting point, anatomy and chemical composition of its leaves; and the density of its wood.
“We are tuning in to what the plants are telling us about their preferences, in the language of their tissues and physiology, aiming to help them survive escalating climate challenges.”
Sack, working with UCLA postdoctoral scholar Camila Medeiros and an international team analyzed 10 distinct leaf and wood traits from more than 100 species in a range of environments mostly within the University of California Natural Reserve System.
And until now, no test combined all of the available state-of-the art measurement technologies – for example, vapor-pressure osmometry to determine plants’ wilting points – with advanced statistical modeling.
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